Prussia had no alternative as a conquered land but to
radically accelerate her momentum, or perish. And so, at the present day,
it may not improbably be with us. Competition must grow intenser.
With England the situation in 1800 was very different. It was less
strenuous. Nothing is more notable in England than to observe how, after
the Industrial Revolution began, there was practically no means by which a
poor man could get an education, save by educating himself. For instance,
in February 1815, four months before Waterloo, George Stephenson took out
a patent for the locomotive engine which was to revolutionize the world.
But George Stephenson was a common laborer in the mines, who had no state
instruction available, nor had he even any private institution at hand in
which the workmen whom he employed in practical construction could be
taught. He and his son Robert, had to organize instruction for themselves
and their employees independently. So it was even with a man like Faraday,
who began life as an errand boy, and later on who actually went abroad as
a sort of valet to Sir Humphry Davy. Davy himself was a self-made man. In
short, England, as a community, did little or nothing by education for
those who had no means, and but little to draw any one toward science. It
was at this precise moment that Germany was cast into the furnace of
modern competition with England, who had, because of a series of causes,
chiefly geographical, topographical, and mineralogical, about a century
the start of her.
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